We Were Dead
by Slimes
Summary: It actually has nothing to do with 28 days later, there is just no category to submit stories based off concept albums...This is from the latest Modest Mouse CD.


_This is a story based off of a recent concept album by Modest Mouse. It's M rated for a reason, people. There's a lot of sexism and racism early on too. Just remember that my character's views aren't necessarily my own._

Prologue: We Were Already Dead

There was a creak of old wood. A shuffling of feet on the floor. A withered old man pushed open the withered old door of the bar and listened to the wind chimes tinkle. He was so old. And so tired. Tired enough to go to sleep, and never wake up. He wore a black hat and black clothes, and had a short white beard. His face was also white, although not by physical definition, but by the definitions of creed. He wore a leather jacket and black leather pants. He shuffled over and sat on one of the barstools. 

"Hey pal. You want something to drink?" The old man simply glared at him with his cold black eyes, forcing the bartender to back away. Then, as if his anger wasn't burdening enough, he saw a bunch of young people over at a table laughing and talking like they had all the time in the world.

"This big, big fish...you wouldn't believe it..." The others were staring at this one guy in total amazement. The old man went over and slapped down a map on the table which made everyone look up at him. The map read "Sargasso Sea" on it in a swirly font.

"Shut your damn mouths! Bunch of brain-dead bastards!" He roared, slamming his fist on the table before sitting down. The rest eyed him with a bit of hatred, a bit of curiousity.

"I've got a damn tale for you, if you ever heard one, I do." The man looked around the table at everyone, hating them with his eyes. Some scoffed. Some stayed quiet.

"Oh yeah? Prove it, old man." One said, cockily and obviously the leader of the group. And then came a smile from the old man.

"Gladly. The year was 1945..."

1945. The year that had started it all. For him, and for everyone else he knew and cared about. The year they all screwed up worse than you could ever imagine. 

1945. Damn, what a hell of a year! Or so thought Tom McRhodes. He waltzed down the streets of Sargose, Maine while whistling a tune to Bing Crosby's "White Christmas". He even sung a verse.

"I'm dreaming of a White Christmas...Just like the ones I used to know...something-something-something..." He stopped, but then smiled and chuckled.

"Aw, Dangit. I always forget that line." So he went back to whistling. He walked, waving to people and greeting them with a 'good morning' or a 'how do you do'. Finally, he found himself at the dock. There was a medium sized sailboat tied to a post. He was smiling for a number of reasons he was smiling today. Five days ago, the Detroit Tigers had beaten the Chicago Cubs in the World Series. Not only that, but he had convinced a woman into his bed last night, only to leave her this morning. He had left a note that read:

"I don't love you. We're not getting married. But I had a good time last night, so thanks babe." He didn't know why commitments had to be made in order to get in bed with a woman. He sorta wished he could do it whenever he wanted-when he was in the mood. He didn't get why women were always protesting. They always wanted 'equal rights' or some crap like that. "Why do you think it's like this if God didn't intend it to be?" That's what his father had told him once as a young boy. Everyone should learn to accept their place in life. That's what the Egyptians did.

_If I was a woman, I'd do what men told me...I'd stay home and cook and clean like I was supposed to...damn feminists._ Tom looked up at the deck of the ship and saw one of his best friends waving at him. He was tall, and was wearing a brown fedora. He wore a black and white plaid shirt and some gray cargo pants. He wore brown loafers, with one shoe untied. He smoked a ciggarette, and puffed on it, and thin black hair poked out from under the fedora. He had a bit of a big nose, with dark brown colored eyes.

Walking down the dock, Tom waved back. Max turned away and coughed, wheezingly. He spoke in a grisled voice that sort of sounded like a character from an old cowboy movie. The sky was a light blue, and they waited for the others to show up.

Max lit up a ciggarette and smiled, feet up on the small table they were both sitting at.

"So now the women are bitching, huh?" Max asked, not expecting Tom to reply. "Yeah. First the dumbass niggers, and now the whores of America. What next? Gay rights? Hah. Bunch of dumbasses, all of em, if you ask me."

"Whadaya mean?" Tom asked. He was used to his friend's profanity.

"The government, man! Who the hell else would I be talking about? They're too damn soft. It was one thing that they ended slavery in the first place-I would've wanted one, maybe a nice quiet woman who would obey me better than my own wife-but another thing that they gave em' jobs! Christ on the cross...So you take a bunch of uneducated savages from some faraway land and bring em' over here, make em' do your work, so I can understand that. But now that they're bein' educated, don't you think that someday, they'll get their revenge on us? Should've either kept em' slaves or never took them in the beginning. Tryin to take MY job...bullshit. As far as I'm concerned, the gov'ment can kiss my ass." Max finished his angry and opinionated rant with a puff of his cig. He had always been like this, simply because this was how he was raised. He was a firm believer in everything he said.

Tom tried to change the subject.

"Did you hear about the Tigers?" Tom asked.

"What. You mean baseball? You call that a damn sport? Football. Now there's a sport. In baseball you take a ball, smack it with a stick, drop the stick, and run. Now, in football, there's all sorts of positions. There's a bunch of plays, and most of all, you can _tackle_ people! Hah-haah!" Max was also notorious for making long-winded rants. Just at that moment, they heard a voice from behind them, from on the docks. They turned to see two men standing there. One of them was shrimpy, scrawny and lanky. The three "ly" words. He had medium length black hair, which was unusual in this time period. It also looked quite shiny. He had a slight mustache, and some hair on his face. He had dark blue eyes and wore a green bandana around his neck. He wore a white buttoned-down shirt, with cargo shorts. He was obviously quite young, perhaps around 19, 20, and he was wearing work boots. The other man looked much older, with a thick beard and mustache. He had red-orange hair, which matched his facial. He was wearing a ratty olive green jacket with short sleeves and torn black pants. He smiled up at them drunkenly. Because he was.

"Gentlemen," Max grinned from ear to ear. "We're all going to be filthy rich!"

"Hey man, you've got it all wrong. Life is like a grapefruit-when you sink your teeth in it, it's a little bit sweet and a bit sour. Understand?"-Anonymous

Chapter One: Invisible

Football. Did he call that a sport? Sure, it had lots of positions. Then again, so did sex. Tony Banderez didn't know anything about that. At nineteen, he was still very much a virgin, probably due to one fact. It wasn't that he couldn't have gotten with the ladies if he wanted to, it's that he didn't want to. He was more interested in getting with the guys. Of course, no one knew this, and he told no one, so that was how things had stayed. When he was seven, his parents found out and disowned him-threw him out on the streets. At that point, he didn't even know what was going on, but he figured that something must have been wrong with him, that he must of had some sort of disease. The orphanage took him in when they found him, and he was given a mediocre education. No college or High School, though.

During his stay, a couple of times he had tried to kiss the other boys, and the orphanage people-or whoever they were, it seemed they were just dark and mysterious figures to Tony-got worried and seperated him from them, trying to put him with the girls. He wasn't happy and he didn't talk to them. By the time he got out at the age of eighteen, he had the education of a fifth grader and the common sense of a sixth. After that he had met up with Tom and Max, who were nice enough fellows, and a constantly drunk older fellow named Gary. He had been friends with them for a year, and had develloped a boyish crush on Max. It felt silly to him, but he couldn't help admiring Max's well-shaven face. Sometimes thinking of him made him hot and flustered and really uncomfortable. So he tried not to.

He recognized Max's racism and thought little of it. Ironically, because he didn't know what gay meant. When Max had talked about it to him, he just nodded his head and smiled. Hell, it seemed that Max talked a lot about these so-called "gay" people. 'Those damn gays!' 'Fruity bastards!' 'I wish those fags would try getting with me', and other such versions of this were what Tony was accustomed to hearing. He figured these gay people must be pretty awful for Max to be talking about them like that. Yup. Gays and blacks. The two targets in Max's sniper. But that had all stopped being important the moment Max had mentioned "money". That was one thing that Tony knew about. He had always wanted to have it. He did not own a house, so he spent most of his time on the street. He imagined what it would be like to have a house...and a family? No. 

Then he would have to touch a girl-a woman really-in places that he thought would be just disgusting. He saw the adults watching that kind of stuff when he was little, and he didn't like it. 

"Rich?" Tony asked, eyes wide like a child's. 

"That's right Tony. I said rich. As in filthy stinkin rich. We'll be able to buy Yankee Stadium with the prize we're going after." Max was smiling impishly and had a faraway look on his face. Tom looked at him, studying that same face.

"Pretty bold claim, there, Max. Can you back it up?" He asked.

"You bet your skinny ass I can. You fellas ever heard of the Sargasso Sea?" Tom groaned and Max looked dissapointed.

"You know that's just a myth. You really think it's real? You a darn fool, Max." Tom laughed and Max's dissapointed look turned to one of anger...maybe an unnecesary amount.

"You think you know so much Tom? Listen to your buddy Max. I know just what I'm talking about. I found it pals. Me. So don't go thinking you could just get one up on me."

"Hey, sorry." Tom backed off, and Max lightened up.

"Any questions?"

The drunken man-whos name was Gary-raised his hand.

"Where's the beer, Maxy?"

Now they were all on board, sitting around a table and looking at a map that Max had made of his own design. Gary was passed out on the floor. They had turned him on his side so he wouldn't choke on his own puke, and they had thrown a blanket over him. He was born in the factory, far, far away from the milk and tea. Literally speaking, he was a child laborer, without parents or siblings. The few companions he did have died around him in the steel prison they had all constructed for their own selfish reasons. He met a boy one week and they became friends-or at least as close as two could be friends in such a place-and his arm was cut off by a saw blade. The arm was bandaged, but he died from tetnis a week later. That was the longest he ever had a friend. Usually he met someone, and then a couple of days later, they would have been carried off in a body bag, probably to be dumped in a river or something. One boy even said that the bodies were ground up and used as hamburger meat. Gary didn't believe him. Miraculously, he survived in all of his years in that deadly place and made it out as an adult.

His misery was so great, he became an alchoholic. He tried to get a job, but everywhere he went, he was turned down. Living homelessly, he had been beaten up several times, and some people even stole his food. Once, he had found a large, mostly still fresh loaf of bread, and his mouth had watered, and there were tears in his eyes and he had never been so happy in all of his life. A woman had ran up and stole the bread from his hands. He had never been so miserable in all his life. He had weeped miserably. He had long ago given up on believing in human kindness when a young man had taken him in, given him food, clothing, and other things that were neccesary for one to survive. The young man's name was Tom, and Gary had thought over his previous beliefs. There was kindness in this world! But, it was kindness of people inside a world of cruelty. He blessed it anyway. Now he lay on his side, yellowish drool leaking out of his mouth. It was surprising he hadn't died from alchohol poisoning yet.

"So here's what I know so far," Max pointed at the map. "It's southeast of Florida. It's a sea that's been undiscovered, but named by all the government conspiracy weirdos. Turns out they were right...about this anyway. I was sailing one day, when I noticed that wherever I was, it wasn't on the map. And I had heard the stories about how all of a sudden the water just got colder, and that fog came out of nowhere. I knew then, by some impulse that it had to be what they always talked about. I also remembered that they had talked about some treasure that was somewhere in this sea. It was on one of the islands." Tony smiled and jumped up in the air. He was as giddy as a little boy. Of course, he sort of was, in a way. Tom looked at the kid's-that's what he was to Tom, a kid-enthusiasm with an appreciation, one of innocence. Since, that was exactly what Tony could be praised for. Although, the catholic and jewish and christian faiths would try to convince you otherwise.

"Now. Get ready, all of you. By tomorrow afternoon you should be all packed. We can take a train to Florida, and from there we can rent a boat-bigger than my peice of crap-and set out for treasure. As for right now, go enjoy your last days of leading half-assed lives. We're going to be loaded, fellows. Loaded."


End file.
